Drunk Driving: “I Drove Drunk and Killed Two Sisters”

Brandy Graff can’t remember the moment that changed her life. She does remember enjoying a gorgeous day at the beach, heading to a party at some college guys’ house, drinking another beer, and waking up in a hospital room with a man in scrubs gripping her shoulders. She started yelling and fighting to get free when his voice cut through her confusion: “You’ve killed somebody!” Graff passed out again—her last, brief reprieve before the harsh new reality of the rest of her life.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005, was forecast to be in the 80s—sunny and unseasonably warm for early spring in Rhode Island. A little after 9:00 A.M., 18-year-old Graff jumped into her stepfather’s Mazda and went to Narragansett beach with a girlfriend and a 24-pack of Budweiser. “We drank in the car on the way to the beach and for the next several hours on the sand,” Graff says. This was nothing out of the ordinary for her. “I loved to party. I’d go to house parties and play beer pong and card games, or go dancing at clubs, with my fake ID,” she says. On the way home from the beach, she says, she and her friend decided to hit a college kegger before meeting up with Graff’s boyfriend of six months. It was 3:30 P.M., and the two girls had finished most of the case of beer.

A few towns away, Theodora “Dora” Mastracchio, 95, and her sister, Victoria “Vicky” Riccio, 86, had spent the afternoon dancing at the local seniors club. Afterward, Mastracchio’s daughter, Karen Bucci, suggested they all go out for chowder and clam cakes, and the sisters were thrilled. They were always busy—knitting hats for the homeless, volunteering at a nursing home, spending time with their various grandchildren or great-grandchildren. They could often be seen cruising around town in a grandnephew’s Mustang convertible, their white hair blowing in the wind. “They were always happy,” Bucci, now 67, says. “Whatever anyone needed, they were there.”

After an early dinner, Mastracchio, Riccio and Bucci piled into Bucci’s car for a scenic drive along the waterfront. Sometime before 6:30 P.M., Graff and her friend left their party. Graff can’t recall if they discussed whether she should be getting behind the wheel. “I don’t remember driving erratically,” she admits. But Bucci remembers. “I saw a gold flash,” she says, looking down as she replays the scene yet again in her mind. “All of a sudden—boom! It was like a slow-motion movie.” Graff careened left on the two-lane road, slamming head-on into Bucci’s car. Bucci hurt her ankle and broke her ribs, but Riccio died at the scene. Mastracchio succumbed to injuries three days later.

The sisters were among the nearly 16,000 people killed that year in alcohol-related crashes. And although that figure has since declined, the number of women driving drunk has gone up: FBI statistics show that since 2005, DUI arrests of young women jumped a staggering 36 percent. One reason for the spike is that groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) have successfully pushed for better enforcement of laws, says José Alberto Uclés, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But another major contributing factor is that women are drinking more, he says. (Under the same vigilant police efforts, arrests among young men were up only 4 percent.)

The statistics, while startling, reflect the well-documented trend of women overindulging: According to one study, 37 percent of college women binge-drink. Jersey Shore’s Snooki and Angelina chug until they fall over, and multiple offender Lindsay Lohan is more punch line than cautionary tale, preening for the cameras wearing only a bikini and her sobriety-monitor ankle cuff. Women are working harder and partying harder, and often driving home afterward, sending a message that drinking and driving is not just tolerated; it’s expected and even condoned. “It was so easy for Brandy—she got beer from adults,” says Gabrielle Abbate of the Rhode Island chapter of MADD. “We need to start respecting the fact that alcohol is a drug and it causes harm.”

“I Felt Like Prison Was Where I Belonged”

The day after the accident, when Graff came to in the hospital, she was handcuffed to her bed, her worst injury a gash on the knee. (Her friend—whose name was never released because she was 16 at the time—also suffered minor wounds.) Graff was arraigned in her hospital room on multiple felonies, including reckless driving resulting in death. Authorities took her to the state correctional facility, where she was fingerprinted, photographed, and held for a few hours until her parents posted bail. “I just couldn’t wrap my mind around what had happened,” she says. “How could things go so terribly wrong? Was I really responsible for ending a human life? Could I kill someone and not even know it?”

Graff spent the next two years out on bail, awaiting her sentencing through a plea bargain. She forced herself to go to community college classes and attended outpatient drug and alcohol treatment. “I didn’t want to go out in public,” she says. “I was so ashamed. I felt like prison was where I belonged.” Watching the news coverage of her case, she saw for the first time the faces of the women she’d killed. “They were smiling, they were happy. They looked like people I could know, like my grandma,” she says. Graff believed that she should have been the one killed. “There are times when I just wanted to die. When you do something like what I’ve done, you try to figure out how to fix it, how to make up for it. But there is no solution.”

In June 2007, a month before her twenty-first birthday, Graff was sentenced to 15 years, with at least 10 to serve at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston, Rhode Island. Superior Court judge Stephen Nugent said, “Hopefully, the word will go out: You drink, you drive, you hurt someone or kill someone, you will be seriously punished.” Graff was led out of the courtroom by two police officers. She was now inmate #128457.

“I’m Brandy: Killer”

Now Graff’s typical morning starts with a cup of instant coffee in the cell she shares with another woman. She spends her days scrubbing toilets, lugging trash and mowing the lawn. The friends who used to be central in her life don’t write or visit, but she does see her boyfriend and her stepdad. Her mom brings takeout three times a week, which they eat with plastic forks under the watchful gaze of the guards. “Drive safe,” Graff says to her mother before she walks into the night.

A year into her sentence, Graff began speaking to groups of high schoolers about drinking and driving. Once a week during the school year, she’d tell her story, often breaking down in tears. But she says these talks have given her a reason for being alive. She wants to show the students that they could just as easily be in her shoes. “Never in a million years did I think I would be in jail. People like me don’t go to jail. I wasn’t a criminal,” she tells them. “You don’t want to be me…. I’m now Brandy: drunk driver. I’m now Brandy: killer.” She’s received letters from students who say that hearing her story helped them make better choices. But it can’t undo the terrible one she made, she says. “I’ll never be OK with what happened.”

“Sorry Doesn’t Even Scratch the Surface”

While other members of the victims’ families have not contacted Graff, Bucci and her daughter Melissa have visited her in prison—once when a student group came to hear Graff speak and once during regular visiting hours. “I have a broken heart, and that is never going to mend,” Bucci says. “But I didn’t want hatred on top of that.” Bucci approached Graff before she was to speak and, seeing that she was nervous, hugged her and whispered in her ear, “What I want you to do for me is get up there and speak very strong so these kids understand that this cannot continue.” Later, in a letter, she told Graff to be a good person, “and if it gets hard, you ask my mother and my aunt to help you and they will.” Graff was stunned by her show of compassion. “I didn’t understand why she was being so nice to me,” she says. “You say sorry to someone, but it seems so stupid coming out of your mouth, because sorry doesn’t even scratch the surface. I used to hope I could make it up to them, that if I kept talking to the kids and doing good things, I could make them feel better. But I’ve ruined their lives.”

Should Graff be forgiven? She was only 18 when she drove drunk, an age when many of us make foolish choices. But she didn’t have a beer or two; she drank until she blacked out, and got behind the wheel several times that day. “She was old enough to reason,” says Abbate of MADD. “And I’ll bet she knew that what she was doing that day was wrong. So she goes through the justice system, and we hope that she will be rehabilitated.” Some believe that making an example of someone like Graff will scare others straight. But Hugh Gusterson, Ph.D., a sociologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who has studied underage drinking, says that to come down hard on Graff is to ignore our collective culpability. “Brandy Graff was enabled by adults who provided the alcohol, and was incited by peers who considered it cool to drink to excess, then drive,” he says. “She made her choices in a society that glorifies drinking.” What we should be focusing on, he argues, is prevention: For every Graff, there are countless young women who slide behind the wheel after a few cosmos and barely make it home. Sending one or even a dozen Brandy Graffs to prison won’t change that, Gusterson says. “The most important question is: What will stop this from happening? Why do young adults think drinking is the most exciting thing?”

If Graff serves all 10 years, she will leave prison at age 31, although she’ll likely get out sooner for good behavior. Last October she was eligible for her first chance at parole. She prepared a packet for the board, hoping that a woman who made a terrible mistake as a teenager might be given a second chance. But Bucci, for all of her forgiveness, did not support Graff’s release. “Three years is not enough for killing two people—my mom and my aunt were worth more than that,” she told the parole board. Bucci still suffers from breathing problems and a limp, and often sees the crash flash in front of her; she remembers her aunt struggling to draw in her last breaths.

The hearing didn’t last very long. Parole was denied. Graff will be eligible again in two years.

Bethany Vaccaro teaches philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. What do you think? Share your views on Brandy and this troubling issue below.